If you want to build a large pronunciation dictionary, you might want to create or edit the rules on your Mac or PC. Fortunately, you can create or edit the rules using a plain text editor and paste it into Voice Dream Reader.
The syntax rules are very simple:

  • One line per rule.
  • For each rule, there’re 5 fields separate by commas. The field are:
    1. Search text. In double quotes. This is the string that you want to search for.
    2. Match mode. 0=Word, 1=Anywhere, 2=Regular Expression. For word search, it is considered a match only if the search text is a single word, and it appears in the text as a single word and not a part of another word. “Any Text” search results in a match no matter where the search text appears even if it’s a full sentence, or a string that appears as a part of a word.
    3. Ignore case. Y=Yes, N=No.
    4. Pronunciation text. In double quotes. This is how you want the search text pronounced.
    5. Pronunciation rule type: 0=Pronounce As, 1=Skip. If the value is 1 (Skip), then the pronunciation text is ignored.

For example, to skip the words “Moby Dick” since it is the book’s title which appears on every page of a PDF file, the rule is:
“Moby Dick”,1,N,””,1
You want to match “Anywhere” because the search text is not a word. And you don’t want to ignore case, because you don’t want to skip the words “moby dick” in the main text.
To pronounce “lol” as “laughing out loud”, the rules is:
“lol”,0,Y,”laughing out loud”,0
Here, you want to match by word, so that “lollipop” would not be affected. And you want to ignore case because you want to replace all caps “LOL” also.